Power Game (70 page)

I was stunned both by what he said and by his cavalier candor about the hypocrisy of the private debate inside the administration and the obvious flimflam of its public façade. Stockman is a true believer, a political zealot, Jesuitical in his pursuit of whatever is his current truth, even if that means renunciation of what he believed a few months, or weeks, ago. Political loyalties do not bind him long. In his youth, he had gone from Goldwater Republicanism to anti-Vietnam campus radicalism at Michigan State University, then to Harvard Divinity School, and then he had proceeded to the liberal Republicanism of John Anderson, through supply-side fever into the Reagan camp, and now he was thoroughly disillusioned by what he had imagined as the Reagan revolution. He talked about past allies and enemies with caustic candor.

However helpful I found Stockman’s frankness about “what happened” in putting together Reagan’s economic agenda in 1981, I was deeply disturbed to hear him talk so offhandedly about fiddling with such huge numbers in private while selling the Reagan program in public. He was willing to admit his guilt and yet seemed to believe that his strange confessional would prove his good intentions and ultimately absolve him of responsibility. But the substance of what he said was damning for him as well as for the president.

Stockman scoffed that the Laffer curve, on which the Reagan-Kemp-Roth tax cut was based, was “miracle economics.” In restrospect, he said the only way the country could afford a ten-percent annual cut in tax rates—without massive deficits—was through tax bracket creep caused by inflation. When inflation fell below five percent, Stockman said, a structural deficit was inevitable. It became permanently imbedded when Reagan agreed in 1981 to index the tax rates for inflation to stop bracket creep. In Stockman’s view, both Reagan’s program and the disastrous estimates of the Rosy Scenario made a mockery of Reagan’s happy talk that lower tax rates would yield higher tax revenues and thus lead toward a balanced budget.

“On a five-year basis, our giant tax cut and big defense buildup cost nearly $900 billion,” Stockman wrote in early 1986. “Our domestic spending cuts … came to only about half that. So how could you worsen a budget by $900 billion, cut it by $450 billion, and still come out with a balanced budget?”
⁷⁰
Only by the Reagan Rosy Scenario, fat inflation forecasts, and superoptimism about economic growth. “We insisted that we had found the economic Rosetta stone,” Stockman ruefully commented, but “our Rosetta stone was a fake.”
⁷¹

Not only did Stockman denounce what he called “the shameless, groundless fiscal fiction [that] steadily emanated from the White House,” but he asserted that Reagan’s presidency almost certainly would “record the lowest eight-year real GNP growth rate since World War II.” Historians, he said, would be left with the riddle: “Why was this fiscal and financial mutation allowed to build and fester for seven years after it was evident that a stunning but correctable economic policy error had been made in the first six months of 1981?” Although Reagan always blamed Congress, Stockman blamed Reagan for mobilizing the nation’s voters as “an overpowering bloc vote against necessary taxation.”
⁷²

Without following all of Stockman’s arithmetic or knowing how the Rosy Scenario had been put together inside the Reagan administration in 1981, most members of Congress had come to share Stockman’s
conclusion about the false promise of Reaganomics by 1985. Disillusionment was rampant. Most leaders in both parties in both houses had concluded that some tax increases were needed, and Reagan was simply wrong and being stubborn about it. In short, Reagan and his team had lost the intellectual initiative by 1985. That loss of faith was as important as the tactical blunders of Reagan and his lieutenants in stymieing Reagan’s agenda game in the second term.

The annual spring dinner of the Gridiron Club, an elitist social club of sixty print journalists, is one of the high tribal rites of Washington insiders. It is a gathering of political celebrities that combines snob appeal with Hollywood glitter. The Gridiron dinner brings together six hundred of the most powerful, best-known people in America in an evening of poking fun. Every president since Benjamin Harrison has come to the Gridiron Club dinner at least once. To less exalted politicians, an invitation to the Gridiron banquet is coveted as a mark of making it. The occasion always draws a sidewalk crowd, as limousines deposit the high and mighty in white tie and tails and evening gowns at the Capitol Hilton hotel. Inside, the red-jacketed Marine band stirs a throb of patriotism with Sousa marches. Spotlights play over long tables, festooned with red roses, picking out Hollywood stars rubbing elbows with the captains of industry, the anchors of television, the publishers and other princes of the print press, the deans of the diplomatic corps, the elders of the Supreme Court, the movers and shakers
of Congress, and the ranking echelons of the current administration.

For more than a century, the Gridiron has roasted the nation’s leaders with vaudeville skits. By tradition, one politician from each party gets the right of reply: Geraldine Ferraro after the 1984 Democratic defeat, Bob Dole after the Republican loss in 1976. The president is always given the last word and receives a toast. Lyndon Johnson, who took heavy flak in his final years, once groused earthily that the Gridiron dinner was “about as much fun as throwing cowshit at the village idiot.” More deftly, Ronald Reagan—who thrived on the by-play—called it “the most elegant lynching I have ever seen.”

But Reagan got off his own sallies, year after year, especially at the 1984 dinner. Eyeing potential Democratic rivals, Reagan ruled out Gary Hart with the quip that “the country won’t want a president who looks like a movie star.” As for Alan Cranston, then a bald sixty-nine-year-old, he said: “Imagine running for president at his age! He won’t have the problem I had—the press won’t be bugging him, does he dye his hair?”

For some politicians, the Gridiron has been a priceless forum for reshaping their images and reputations by showing a human side, an ability to laugh at themselves, which is the principal formula of success at the dinner. After his “hatchet man” role as the vice-presidential nominee in 1976, Bob Dole turned a new leaf at the Gridiron by ruefully joking that the person wounded most by his razor tongue “was me.” Senator Edward Kennedy, whose 1980 presidential hopes were badly damaged by his fumbling television interview with NBC’s Roger Mudd, brought down the house in 1986 with his mock protest that Mudd, a Kennedy family intimate, “came up to
my
house on
my
Cape Cod and sat in one of
my
chairs on
my
front lawn and asked me trick questions, like ‘Why do you want to be president?’ ”

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter made a hit in 1978 by jitterbugging on stage. Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew had a Gridiron audience roaring with a piano duet doing a parody on Nixon’s “southern strategy” for the 1972 campaign. Whatever tune Nixon would start, Agnew would drown him out with “Dixie.” Ronald Reagan scored with a soft-shoe routine in a black-and-silver sombrero as the surprise kicker in a Gridiron Club chorus line, doing a self-parody to the tune of “Mañana Is Soon Enough for Me.”

But for a sheer turnaround—and a political facelift—no Gridiron guest in recent years has outdone Nancy Reagan.

By the end of 1981, the Reagans’ first year in the White House, she had become a terrible political liability. The press was snapping at her
as a frivolous clotheshorse who hobnobbed with the idle, partygoing rich. Her inaugural wardrobe—a red Adolfo dress, a black formal dress by Bill Blass, a white, beaded, off-the-shoulder gown by James Galanos, and a brand-new full-length Maximillian mink coat—was said to have cost twenty-five thousand dollars. She had three hairdressers at her beck and call.

Mrs. Reagan stirred up a hornet’s nest by putting the arm on Republican fat cats for $800,000 in private donations to spruce up the White House mansion, inviting howls that the donors were buying influence. Another hullabaloo broke out when Mrs. Reagan purchased a 220-piece set of gilt-edged china, through similar private financing, for $209,508. When Mrs. Reagan went to London for the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, the British press knocked her for splashy fashions and cumbersome motorcades. Novelty shops sold postcards mocking her as “Queen Nancy” in ermine and a crown. In a 1981 poll by
Good Housekeeping
, Mrs. Reagan did not even make the ten top women in America.

Reagan strategists feared that Nancy Reagan’s bad press could hurt the president’s popularity; they held meeting after meeting to figure out how to fix her rich-girl image. They got her to donate her fancy designer dresses to the Smithsonian Institution. When an Air Florida passenger plane crashed into a Potomac River bridge in January 1982, Mrs. Reagan went to hospitals to comfort survivors. But unlike Lady Bird Johnson with her beautification projects, or Betty Ford with her antidrug work, Mrs. Reagan had no cause which touched a popular chord. Initially, the imagemakers had rejected the drug issue as too depressing, but now they agreed when Mrs. Reagan wanted to pursue that issue. Her staff developed a campaign that eventually had her making forays to drug rehabilitation centers, talking to teenagers, appearing on such popular television shows as
Diff’rent Strokes
and
Good Morning America
, and making a joint appeal to the nation with the president in 1986.

But the pivotal moment in her press coverage was the Gridiron dinner of March 27, 1982. The idea of having the first lady do a Gridiron appearance was the brainchild of Sheila Tate, Mrs. Reagan’s Washington-wise press secretary. Tate figured (correctly) that Mrs. Reagan was bound to be a target of a press parody; her notion was to have Mrs. Reagan seize the moment by responding. “For an event that has no television coverage and almost no press coverage, the Gridiron dinner is the most influential three or four hours,” Tate later explained. “The criticism of Nancy was coming mainly from the Washington
political community. What better event for her to humanize herself?”
¹

Tate floated the idea with the first lady. “Would you sing?” Tate asked her. Nancy agreed. “Would you dance?” Another nod from the former movie starlet. Then Tate secretly tried out her notion with Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent for United Press International who in 1975 had become the first woman elected to the Gridiron Club. Thomas, club President Ben Cole and club Vice President Charles McDowell, leaped at the offer to put Mrs. Reagan on stage. The club would parody Mrs. Reagan’s lavish wardrobe; they wanted her to respond by making fun of the press. But wisely, Mrs. Reagan sidestepped a sparring match. “No,” she told Tate and Deaver, “you have to be able to laugh at yourself. I think that’s how we ought to do it.”

Landon Parvin, a witty White House speechwriter, worked with Tate to put together a routine based on the old tune “Second Hand Rose” but restyled as “Secondhand Clothes.” Secretly, Mrs. Reagan rehearsed it at the White House, without telling the president; she sneaked off for one tryout on the Gridiron stage. Her moment came when the Gridiron chorus did its version of “Secondhand Clothes,” mocking her extravagance. Mrs. Reagan slipped away from the head table, her husband thinking she was headed for the ladies’ room.

Tate, sitting between two newspaper publishers, recalled one telling the other, “Nancy Reagan has left the head table. I’ll bet she’s ticked”—presumably at the ribbing the Reagans had been taking. Tate pretended not to hear. “I felt that typified the feeling in the room,” she said. “There was a delicious meanness toward Nancy. Her image was of a very brittle, uncaring, self-absorbed socialite.” Then, moments later, Mrs. Reagan burst through a rack of clothes on stage. She was clad in an outlandish getup, an aqua skirt with red and yellow flowers held together by safety pins, a floppy feathered hat, and a feathered boa.

There was a moment of incredulous silence. “People were shocked,” Tate recalled, which is how I remember it, too. No one thought that Mrs. Reagan had any slapstick, any self-mockery in her. “As it registered, people jumped to their feet and started to applaud. I felt the attitudes in that room change,” Tate went on. “It was as if that was all she had to do. People were so surprised that she would do something that looked so foolish. It was very risky. She could have messed it up. The words were so self-deprecating. The point was that she cared what other people thought of her and she showed it.”

Nancy Reagan, with a touch of soft-shoe and a steady voice, swung into her lyrics:

For an exit, she was supposed to shatter a china plate on the stage. She slammed it down but it did not break. The audience did not care. She got a standing ovation and the cheering crowd brought her back for an encore. “It was a gutsy move on Nancy’s part,” observed Joseph Canzeri, then a presidential aide. “Nobody knows how anybody’s going to react to that routine. It could have backfired. The factor of surprise was important. The fact that it couldn’t be on TV helped make Nancy willing.”
²

Her success hinged on following one cardinal rule of politics: Hang a lantern on your problem; that is, play up a vulnerability and dispose of it by mocking your own foibles.
³
As Reagan himself proved many times, that technique can lance the boil of criticism. So often, criticism loses its edge if a politician simply admits his problem. Often the best way to disarm a hostile press is to embrace them; “love bombing,” some call it. In this case, it was strictly an inside-the-beltway phenomenon. A story about Nancy Reagan at the Gridiron dinner appeared in Monday’s
Washington Post
, but otherwise, according to Gridiron tradition, the affair remained unreported. Only the inner core of the Washington community had seen this side of Mrs. Reagan. But that community included most of the important journalists and politicians, and among this crucial audience, Mrs. Reagan’s image had been remade in a few short minutes. Inside the beltway, people talked with amusement and warmth about her Gridiron appearance. She had won a new beginning—a new image—with the political press.